Same. Pre-diabetic and all kinds of other health issues started creeping up (obesity, GERD, really bad heartburn, sleep apnea, etc). Most doctors would've just had me take medications, wear a mask that would breathe for me while I slept, and put my bed at an angle so I could sleep through the heartburn/reflux.
Started calorie restricting and eliminated grains and sugar from my diet almost entirely, and all pre-diabetic symptoms disappeared within a month or two. Zero GERD, zero heartburn, no longer obese, no more disturbed sleep, lots of energy.
I think in most cases type 2 diabetes (and most symptoms associated with obesity, metabolic syndrome, etc) is a disease people inflict on themselves through poor diet. Particularly by eating refined carbohydrates (especially wheat and sugar) and being genetically predisposed to not metabolizing those very well.
The food industry spends a lot of money skewing the research on this and pushing people toward exercise so they can wash their hands of it all, and they have the cooperation of the USDA (just look at that ridiculous pyramid ffs). So you kind of just have to explore this diet on your own through a lot of noise and people telling you you're wrong. In my case it was an outright cure for a lot of health problems, and it didn't take very long to confirm that either. I don't read public health journals or articles about nutrition anymore.
While I wasn't overweight or obese I had definitely gained 10+KG a few years back, and was bordering on overweight (according to BMI, which is just one indicator, not the only one, and again, take it with a grain of salt and in moderation).
For a while I completely stopped drinking alcohol, soft drink, wheat and refined sugar. Basically meat, vegies, fish, whole fruit (not juice). Lost all the extra weight within a few months, and enjoyed great energy.
Being 100% honest, I now find that soda is very sweet, and I now no longer drink alcohol at all. I have re-introduced some wheat and refined sugar, but keep it to a very minimum and try and combine it with other ingredients. (e.g. banana avocado cacao mousse). Never going back to drinking all that soda and buying everything as a sandwich.
I started putting on some weight after beginning full time work after college (no longer walking around campus, always having a decent lunch--it made a difference!) Two years ago I decided to limit my consumption of refined sugar to two desserts a year. I cut out pop, fruit juice, don't drink alcohol or coffee, avoid white flours and aim for foods made of whole ingredients---fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts, etc. I'm at roughly 10lbs below where I was when that started, which is nice, but also it's transformed my feelings about sugar.
Like gergnz, pop is really sweet! Unbearably sweet. Actually most sweets are just overwhelming concentrations of sugar, and they feel weird to eat.
Sweetness is something that your body adjusts to. Once you're used to eating a brownie a day, brownies no longer seem so sweet to you. But go without sweets for six months and suddenly you'll realize just how pointlessly sweet they are.
The thing that really drives me crazy is how _so much_ food is sweetened, even things where it makes no sense. It's like everybody's palette is so accustomed to sugar that now restaurants have to add sugar to their savory foods just to make them taste normal. It's a disturbing trend.
Reminder: the US government spends $2 billion a year on sugar subsidies.
Coming from The Netherlands to live in the US for a while, I found the same. It seems like just everything contains more high-fructose corm syrup, and tastes sweeter. Even all breads.
In a vaguely similar vein, I pretty much exclusively[1] drink "diet" drinks (i.e. sweeteners rather than sugar, not that I think they are particularly healthly). Now, whenever I have the non-diet versions (which is very rare), I prefer the taste somewhat, but find them to be unpleasantly sticky and syrupy. It almost feels like they need more water adding to them, even if it's from a can/bottle so presumably mixed correctly.
[1] Unless it's a mixed alcoholic drink, but those are so different anyway
About that mousse... One mental changed that helped me was to become a foodie. Eating used to be just a chore (simple fuel). Now I cook and eat because it's fun.
Also, people are so clever now, finding recipes like your mousse has been a great joy. I now mostly prefer the more wholesome alternatives. For instance, that mousse is a huge hit, and most people wouldn't know it's non-dairy.
"A few months and about 50lbs in, I had no signs of insulin resistance whatsoever, my A1C was down to completely normal values, and I was able to discontinue my medication entirely."
...
"Started calorie restricting and eliminated grains and sugar from my diet almost entirely, and all pre-diabetic symptoms disappeared within a month or two. Zero GERD, zero heartburn, no longer obese, no more disturbed sleep, lots of energy."
A serious, well-intentioned[1] question for you and your parent:
How has this changed (or not changed) your views towards classifying obesity/diabetes/metabolic treatments (as opposed to your cure) as unnecessary medical interventions ?
How does this change, if at all, your perception of the responsibility of others to fund those treatments ?
[1] Congratulations on this achievement and your good health.
There's another component to all of this, and that's psychology. There are people who are anorexic/bulimic and it's a horrible affliction. There are also people on the other end who compulsively overeat, usually to cope with some kind of trauma or as a reaction to anxiety. Or just because they've been fed one way since they were children, and habits are really difficult to break.
Distinguishing those people from the people who can just decide to make it better is probably impossible.
So I see some validity to all approaches.
The problem with treating it as purely a medical issue though is that, by doing that, society is being more permissive of the poor decisions people make. People who can choose to eat better and improve their health that way might never find that out, if they're just told it's all medical and we're dust in the wind.
The problem with treating it entirely as a choice is your prescription becomes punitive toward people who genuinely can't control themselves.
So I think the right approach is a balance between the two. Having said that, I think the current climate favors the dust in the wind hypothesis too heavily, and I think a lot of people are hampered and harmed by a complete lack of criticism and concern as they make and keep themselves obese.
I spent many, many thousands of dollars on everything I needed -- and that's not including the tens of thousands my insurance covered. The vast, vast majority of the US population would not be able to afford this. I would very much support subsidizing medical care to a greater extent, but it's not just medical care. The diet (New Direction VLCD) I was on cost me $22 for a box of 7 shakes, of which I would have 3 per day -- $282/mo just for that. That alone puts it out of reach for many people, sadly.
Aside from just the economic side of it, it is exceptionally difficult to lose weight. It drove me to tears and severely impacted my mental state (despite also being treated for my mental illnesses) and that's even despite being very motivated to succeed. I don't look down on anyone looking for an easier route, whatever that may be; if I saw one, I would've taken it myself.
100% correct. It is a lifestyle disease and the reason your doctor won't tell you is because the health industry is built around treatment, not prevention, and so your doctor was never taught this. It's through no ill intent, it just never made good business since to teach doctors much about nutrition or to fund much of the research doctors may prefer to have before adopting new advice. Drug companies on the other hand do bury study results that don't help them, and the food industry does the same and intentionally misleads the public about making healthy diet choices.
Eating whole food plant based diet with moderate exercise usually reverses T2 diabetes and definitely prevents it.
This is a gross oversimplification. Diabetes (particularly type 2) is a complex disease with both environmental and genetic factors. I'm a T2 diabetic and was diagnosed while having a low BMI (20) and reasonably healthy lifestyle. There wasn't much I could actually change about my 'lifestyle' -- no weight to lose, etc. Medication was the only solution and not surprisingly made a significant impact.
I lost 50 lbs and it didn't budge my blood glucose by a single point. So, not OP nor GP but I don't think we know enough to tell people to just figure it out.
What did work for me, a little, was increasing the amount of beans I eat, and with it grains (rice), and curries, and not eating meat for at least two days a week. My bloodwork got better across the board (cholesterol, glucose) despite gaining 10 lbs.
> wear a mask that would breathe for me while I slept
Dude, that's a really bad misrepresentation and very unhelpful to all the people who do need one. Many of them already struggle with self-worth issues, and seeing (whether intentional or not) lies like that spread, or worse, parroted back at them by others later does not help that.
It's made a lot worse by the alternative being to gamble on suffocating in your sleep, or doing brain damage to yourself with prolonged apnea periods that drop your blood oxygen, or at the very least, having a shit life due to low energy levels every day from having been 8 hours with the blood oxygen level of a 90 year old.
You're still breathing entirely under your own power with CPAP devices. All they do is basically balloon you up a little to keep your throat from closing up in your sleep, by providing a continuous flow of air pressure higher than the ambient air pressure. Yes they have an up/down rhythm that matches your breathing, but that's not because it breathes for you, but because it literally matches your breathing patterns so it won't obstruct your own breathing.
> put my bed at an angle so I could sleep through the heartburn/reflux
Also, to be honest, this is ridiculous. Medicines to help your body regulate gastric acid exist and aren't particularly expensive.
FWIW, he didn't specify the type of mask. Something like a non-invasive ventilator is far closer to "a mask that would breathe for me while I slept" than CPAP. I used one for a time due to central sleep apnea - I'd go for 10s of seconds at a time without even _attempting_ to breathe (as opposed to obstructive apnea, where you attempt to breath but struggle due to the airway collapsing).
Unfortunately it didn't help me that much (even with it, I would still not breathe properly which was reflected in my O2 sat. IIRC) and it aggravated other health issues, so I stopped using it after 4-6 months (which, when one of the first things I read after diagnosis was along the lines of "Rarely, CSA may result in sudden death", isn't a choice I made lightly!).
I don't think anyone is disparaging you for needing a CPAP. The goal is to get people to a point where they don't need one.
There are many other health devices that are (likely) obviated by proper health status in life, and maybe more importantly, in utero. Two that come to mind that affect me are glasses and braces.
Indigenous people eating their traditional diet don’t really have crooked teeth. Their jaws are big enough to fit all their teeth, including wisdom teeth. They also don’t really have cavities but that’s another point.
For myopia, there is weak evidence that it is caused by lack of sun exposure at an early age.
So, you can blame your parents for giving you a bad diet low in fat soluble vitamins in your childhood, and not making you go outside. Other than that, you can try to prevent it in your own children.
Beyond nutrient deficiency it seems there may also be effects on teeth straightness from bottle feeding (chronically sucking on many types of baby bottles changes infant mouth shape) and from not chewing enough hard foods as a child. The cavities thing is mostly about sugar and to a lesser extent other processed food.
As for myopia the effect is probably due to some combination of lack of very bright light exposure and a infrequent need to focus far away or too much time spent focusing close without breaks. As you say the solution is to spend more time outdoors as a child, and alternate relatively shorter sessions of desk/screen work with more active interludes, making sure to glance around the room with some frequency.
I did the same, as a side effect. My GF had gestational diabetes and was put on a diet to prevent having to take insuling, so I just ate the same food. Even as a non diabetic, it was so obvious how much better I felt. A lot less tired as well, less tired, even with the erratic sleep cycle of a newborn.
The part almost no one goes into is, so what's your diet now that you've reached the baseline you'd like to keep? Total calorie intake (estimated)? Any food or food groups you still avoid? meal timing? Is it a sustainable lifestyle change?
Have you read "The Hacker's Diet"? It was written by the guy who founded Autodesk, and I found it very useful. My own weight control system now is a simplified and informal version of the one in the book, I used it to go from over 105kg down to my target weight of 90kg and then sustain that loss (staying between 88kg and 90kg) for most of a decade now. A couple of times I've let it creep up and the same methods got me relatively quickly and painlessly back into range.
The most important thing is to see your calorie intake, not as a goal in itself, but as the control variable in a feedback loop, with your weight as the process variable that you're trying to control. (If you really wanted to get hardcore about it, you could use a PID controller to set your daily calorie intake. :)
When you reach your target weight, keep doing whatever you were doing and just gradually increase your portion size until you stop losing weight. If you're gaining weight again, gradually reduce portion size until you get back to your target weight. If you're losing weight, gradually increase portion size until you get back to your target weight. That's literally all there is to maintaining a target weight.
I've embraced the yo-yo, personally, but in my experiments with keto it usually takes me 2x to 3x the time length of the diet to put the weight back on as I revert to my prior eating habits. The longest I've maintained the diet for was about 3.5 months, though over the past year it's averaged closer to 1-2 months at a time. I suspect if I did it for longer or did it more extremely on the calorie-counting side my yo-yo peak would decrease -- I have a friend who went 5 months and lost 100 pounds, now he yo-yos too but his peak before he goes again is only +40 pounds instead of +100. The peak is similar to a baseline, in that if you do nothing different you'll probably remain there. (Of course that's the standard prediction if you look at it from a pure calories in / out model.)
My caloric intake while eating at a deficit was about 1200-1500 kcal. Maintenance is about 2200. I eat a lot of meat, poultry, fish, eggs. No restriction on fats, but I try to favor animal fats and olive oil. Unlimited vegetables. Fruit, but only raw (no dried fruit or juice), and favor berries over bananas. Nuts and cheese in moderation.
If I want carbs, favor sweet potato / regular potato over grains. Generally avoid that altogether though.
No beer, favor wine and liquor, all in moderation.
So that’s how I select, then from there I restrict to the calorie goal. If I do have pasta or cake, I go a little harder on myself the next day (or in the days prior). That’s rare though.
It’s been really easy. Hardest day was day 1, second-hardest day was day 2. Sustained for about a year so far, and I’m not struggling at all.
Dried fruit is basically candy. Fresh fruit has already been cultivated to be extra sweet, extra large, and extra tasty, so it's bad enough by itself. And then you concentrate it, now you can eat many multiple times more sugar in one sitting than the fruit you would see in the wild.
The only saving grace I see is that at least it still has the fiber, fruit juice discards with that and just leaves the sugar.
It's not bad per se, but it contains a lot of sugar per unit volume. Some dried fruit even has extra sugar added (effectively fruit flavored candy). So it's easy to accidentally consume a lot of calories without feeling full.
"Raisins are one of the most commonly consumed dried fruits... Compared to non-consumers, raisin consumers had a lower body weight (-4.2%), body mass index (-5.2%), and waist circumference (-3.8%), were 39% less likely to be overweight or obese, and had a 54% reduced risk of metabolic syndrome. In conclusion, raisin consumption was associated with better nutrient intake, diet quality, and weight parameters, and with lower risk of being obese and having metabolic syndrome in US adults."
Association of raisin consumption with nutrient intake, diet quality, and health risk factors in US adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2012.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29056890
Great Work! that's awesome you could change your diet to a healthy one. These days there's such a huge stigma against eating healthily and responsibly, especially from friends and family.
Yeah, it’s bizarre. The topic of diet has a lot in common with religion. The research is so murky and poorly conducted and everything is a contradiction, so people have a tendency to just pick a “team” and form beliefs around that. Team Vegan, Team Vegetarian, Team Keto, Team Paleo.
If you’re on a different team, you’re an attack on their dietary beliefs. If you’re on any team, you’re a pain in the ass to anyone who hasn’t picked a team yet.
People also have a tendency to form part of their identity around how they eat. “I’m a ______.” So now you’re not just questioning their dietary beliefs, you’re casting judgment on their identity.
So I get why people are so sensitive about it. And like politics and religion, I try to keep it to myself.
I am still trying to dial in my diet Right Now. I am a Type 2 diabetic and cardiac patient; it all came on very fast and furious. I've tried LCHF before and it didn't work as described with my chemistry. Same with vegan (low fat super high carb). What diet Team am I rooting for now?
Team I-Don't-Want-To-Get-A-Bad-Case-of-the-Dead's-Right-Now.
Not sure what form that is but I am still testing.
I saw a ted talk, I think, about the ideal diet. It really depended on how the individuals body responded to foods. Some people can eat rice all day wit minimal glucose spiking and others spike after very little rice. They suggested getting a blood glucose meter. They then suggest monitoring your response to various foods. Look for foods that cause the least spiking and most stable glucose levels.
If you want to get the "team vegan" take on reversing type 2 diabetes with diet then watch Forks Over Knives on Netflix. Its actually not a purely vegan film like everyone claims, because the doctors talk about limiting meat (e.g. 5% meat intake), if not completely removing.
I had great success with what I considered low C, but what would be considered high C by the Atkins, paleo, and keto folks. I aimed for 40% of less of calories from carbs--low by the standards of the average American.
I was not even trying to cut calories. I just wanted to lower blood sugar, and was trying to see how much changing carbs affected that. However, I found that because the food was now more satisfying, I ended up cutting calories as a side effect.
I picked 40% because (1) it is significantly lower than what I was doing before, and (2) it is really easy to check on a nutrition label--take total calories, divide by 10, and if that number is larger not larger than the number of grams of carbs, the item is 40% or under calories from carbs.
If I wanted to eat something that was over 40%, I would fix it by adding fat or protein. For example, suppose I wanted a ham sandwich. Before I would have ordered that with cheese, assorted veggies, and mustard. No mayo to try to keep the calories down.
On the "40% or under" diet, I would order that ham sandwich as before, but would go ahead and add mayo (full fat mayo...none of that lite crap) and/or order it with double meat. That would raise the calories by about 50%, but it would bring the carb percentage down from about 45% to about 30%.
Not all foods could be tweaked easily to bring them under 40%, but if I ate such a food I would try to pair it with other foods that were enough under 40% to bring the total for the meal under 40%, and if a meal was a little off I'd fix it in the next meal.
You can pretty easily keep a running total of how you are doing, by on a food by food basis keeping track of how many grams over or under you are. So if I had something that was 300 calories and 20 grams of carbs, I'd mentally think "300/10 = 30 grams of carbs to be 40%. 20 grams is 10 under, so add -10g to my running total".
If at the end of the day the running total is not positive, I've met my 40% goal for the day.
To reduce the risk of getting to the last meal or snack of the day and being too far over to correct, I put in some effort to make sure breakfast put me a fair amount under 40%.
A nice thing about this approach is that 40% (I actually ended up at around 35% once I found a diet soda that I actually started to like, and so cut full-sugar Pepsi out) can be done without giving up most fast food restaurants. You might have to give up some items on their menus, but a lot of their main items can be brought under 40% by tweaks like I did for my sandwiches. E.g., if you want a burger and fries, you might be able to get the combo down to 40% of you go for the double burger and extra cheese and mayo. Pizza can be gotten under 40% with enough meat and cheese.
That makes it much easier to stick to it compared to diets where you have to plan ahead for all your meals away from home.
Result: over about 18 months, I lost 140 lbs, and then mostly leveled off. A1C went from 8.1 on 4 different diabetes medicines to 4.8 on no diabetes medicines. Also got completely off cholesterol medicines.
To be absolutely fair, Team Keto and Team Paleo are almost the same team. Keto people avoid foods with grains and refined sugars just because they're high carb; Paleo people avoid them because they're toxic, and often naturally fall into a lower carb diet (not necessarily "true" Keto lowness, but still usually a lot lower carb than they were pre-Paleo).
Check NCBI and Pubmed. There's a lot going for ketosis and certain vegetarian diets, backed by good research.
Not saying there aren't an abundance of diet fads that find roosts the minds of uncritical hopefuls (like anything else, really), but being more conscious of what you eat and how you feel is a good thing. If the diet seems zany and tenuous but promotes portion control and variety to people who've been feeding themselves and their families out of cans and whatever is closest and cheapest, I'd tolerate if not encourage their new interest.
Some people's enthusiasms are just difficult to put up with day in and day out, whatever they might be. But in the grand scheme of it, I'd rather they be obsessed with salads than Scentsy.
Yup. And don't forget team "Eat whatever you want, cuz it doesn't matter" They're everywhere and give the rest of us weird looks when we eat Actual food. One guy was surprised to see me eating a tomato. I think, he thought it was just something that gets printed on a can.
Started calorie restricting and eliminated grains and sugar from my diet almost entirely, and all pre-diabetic symptoms disappeared within a month or two. Zero GERD, zero heartburn, no longer obese, no more disturbed sleep, lots of energy.
I think in most cases type 2 diabetes (and most symptoms associated with obesity, metabolic syndrome, etc) is a disease people inflict on themselves through poor diet. Particularly by eating refined carbohydrates (especially wheat and sugar) and being genetically predisposed to not metabolizing those very well.
The food industry spends a lot of money skewing the research on this and pushing people toward exercise so they can wash their hands of it all, and they have the cooperation of the USDA (just look at that ridiculous pyramid ffs). So you kind of just have to explore this diet on your own through a lot of noise and people telling you you're wrong. In my case it was an outright cure for a lot of health problems, and it didn't take very long to confirm that either. I don't read public health journals or articles about nutrition anymore.